Colour fine line tattoo of a nerve cell with branching dendrites and an orange axon, placed on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Neuron tattoo on upper back

Fine line · Back · Colour · Photo

The tattoo depicts a neuron, with a teal and grey cell body, a round orange nucleus, and many thin black branches reaching outwards from it. A segmented orange axon runs down from the body and ends in a smaller branched terminal near the lower edge of the design. Fine black linework is combined with soft teal, orange and grey washes and white highlights, set against a pale back in a close, straight-on composition.

Fine line Back Anatomy

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fig has been trained against the south wall of Hallam Row since before your mother was born, and nobody has ever asked it what it wants. Your grandfather does the asking with secateurs. He stands you on an upturned crate and makes you look at a stem he has just cut, then tells you the tree has no sense of shame, only of reaching. Every shoot that finds a gap in the bricks keeps going until it finds the sun.

Keep reading

The long green cane he ties to the wall is the part you are meant to watch, because it carries the news. Cut the top of it and the fruit at the far bed goes soft within the week. He taught you that with a penknife and a bowl of figs gone sour in the heat. Each knuckle along the cane is a relay, he says, a place where the message is passed on by something that doesn't understand it, like a bucket line at a fire.

In August the wasps come and the cane splits at its far end, where the last few fingers of growth spread over the compost like a hand reaching for a light switch in the dark. You kneel there with the trowel and can find nothing wrong with it. Your grandfather lowers himself down beside you, knees cracking, and says the message has arrived. The bit at the bottom was never meant to be where it stops. It is only where the fruit starts.